The Nostalgic—and Liberating— Power of Makeup

From a punk-rock eyeliner to an editor- approved pressed powder, Louisa Kamps' beauty talismans infuse her future with power from her past.

When I've got someplace special to go—a party or meeting or date for fancy drinks with a favorite friend—every tube, wand, and whisper-soft sable brush I pull from my vanity drawer transports me, Madeleine-like, back to the time I initially acquired it, the mood of that moment, and the hopes (serious or silly) I associated with the item in hand. To wit: Drawing, then smudging, smoky-gray slashes along my lashes with my charcoal-brown Clinique eyeliner pencil, I'm reminded of the coolest girl I knew in high school, who wore a thick layer of this shade and inspired me to buy it with hard-earned babysitting money. Stepping back to take in my newly sultry eyes—parking- lot eyes, as I think of them, because my Milwaukee high school's parking lot was where my friends and I went to primp, represent, and transgress—I am, I swear, always infused with a happy bump of my punk-rock classmate's wild and defiant energy.

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Daubing my cheeks with my Nars Multiple stick in now discontinued Sumatra— a dark bluish-wine, seriously dangerous-looking in the tube—takes me back to the exceedingly kind woman working in Barneys' Madison Avenue makeup department, who, finding me a blotchy wreck when I stumbled in after a particularly brutal appointment at my shrink's office, gently guided me to her chair and put me back in order, visually and emotionally.

As the makeup artist worked the deep maroon way up to the tip-top of my cheekbones, higher and closer to the outer corners of my eyes than I'd ever dusted any garden-variety bronzy-pink powder before, I worried that I'd end up looking like a crazy lady trying to slap on a happy face. Yet when she finished, the person I saw in the mirror looked startlingly beautiful and fierce—and, best of all, exactly like me, reclaiming a bolder stripe of my personality that I'd been missing for some time but recognized immediately. By some act of contrast and shadowing I still don't fully understand, Sumatra banished every trace of tearful ruddiness from my skin. It also emphasized the steelier light in my dark-blue eyes—and made me feel ready (better than that dour shrink ever did!) to get back out there and stare down the jerks messing with my hustle.

Now, applying smoky eye pencil, deep maroon blush (all the way up to there—a trick you ought to try), or any of the magical beauty products in my special makeup drawer, I treasure their talismanlike ability— more powerful than any mood-altering drug I've ever tried—to help me stop feeling mousy when I need to feel commanding, to put me in mind of good people and crazy-good times when I find myself momentarily doubting that goodness actually exists. Reminding me of experiences and encounters in my past that helped me grow and stretch, my best beauty products help me access the full range of my character and capacities and go forward in life feeling gorgeously reenergized—more than game for continued growing and stretching.

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Laid-back L.A. entrepreneur Shiva Rose tells me her "lucky lipstick" is Nars Funny Face. She often wore this unapologetically pretty hot fuchsia shade when she launched The Local Rose, her holistic- living blog. Another "exciting thing" that happened to Rose while she was wearing Funny Face: "I met a gentleman who I dated for some time," she says. "I was feeling like a coquette with that color. It boosted my confidence."

Jodie Patterson, founder of online beauty shop Doobop.com, finds sustenance in the simultaneously floral and musky scent of rose in C.O. Bigelow rose oil, for years her go-to perfume: "I always keep it in my beauty stash, because it's a modern take on glamour and it reminds me of my grandmother—combined with my man. Strange but true!" she says. To explain this seeming paradox, she adds, "My grandmother was old-school movie star glamorous. Her vanity table was full of pretty things and earthy scents like rose. At the same time, she was highly respected in the civil rights movement, landing in jail too many times to count" and ultimately helping change laws, Patterson says. "She was a total boss lady. For me, male and female attributes are always kind of blurred. I never can tell where one ends and the other begins. But rose somehow captures it all. It reminds me of the yin and yang inside me—that I'm a boss lady."

Patterson also rightly notes that, while beauty products' performance is important, how they make us feel inside—so we can "mirror that feeling on the outside"— is just as important. Patting my nose with my impossibly silky sheer T. LeClerc face powder (the best quick shine eliminator I've ever found) and brushing my eyelashes with my uncannily durable Shiseido mascara (its delicate scent a thing of beauty in and of itself), I certainly enjoy both of these products' technical excellence. But I get a bigger kick from the way they remind me of the time I started wearing them more than a decade ago, when I worked in ELLE's beauty department. I also wore that elegant makeup to trashy dive bars up and down the isle of Manhattan, to raucous loft parties, and on dates with unmarried men to great, underground Chinatown restaurants—memories that, when I crack open the T. LeClerc compact or unscrew the Shiseido wand, flood me once again with a lovely rush of expectancy. The feeling that something big could happen at any second. Now that I'm married and have young children and no longer live in New York City (where, really, something exciting can happen at any second), it's helpful to have a quick way to get myself back into that eager, forward-leaning mindset. Taking time to apply these fine products doesn't feel frivolous at all, but as if I'm priming myself to go forth with eyes (pretty ones!) looking up and out—scanning farther horizons for new adventures and new people to meet.

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There are many more empowering nostalgia-sparkers in my drawer. There's the Giorgio Armani Eyes to Kill copper shadow, a lagniappe I picked up at an ELLE event in DC a couple of years back, and the perfect cranberry Boots lipstick I grabbed at the drugstore while visiting London last spring—both resonant souvenirs of wonderful trips, reminding me that I am a cosmopolitan creature: most alive when I am moving around and mingling broadly, pushing the boundaries of my natural comfort zone. More than once, dressed in some minimalist, androgynous outfit, I've run from the bathroom vanity back to my bedroom—after painting my eyes and lips with colors that jolted my imagination out of a rut—to peel off those chic yet severe clothes and put on others that made me feel more affirmatively female, more seductive, more optimistic. It can be startling to realize that, thanks to beauty products, I am more fluid in thought, action, fashion, and persona than I often give myself credit for. But it's also very cool to have these products available, at any time, to transport myself—more open-minded and more open-hearted—back to my past or into the future.

Despite her lab assistant's repeated requests that she toss them, Alexandra Balahoutis, founder of Strange Invisible Perfumes, refuses to part with a collection of nearly dry bottles of perfume, "odd little fragrances"—some worse, some better—that she blended experimentally early in her career. "I was so hungry to create!" Balahoutis says. And "inside these tiny glass bottles, [it's] almost as though in the few milliliters I have left is my very ambition as a young perfumer. They are little bottles of who I was and what I wanted. When I smell them, I remember that early drive, which somehow converted my dream of becoming a perfumer into reality." And if you ask me, she ought to hang on to those lovely little bottles and uncork them whenever she feels the need, for all time.